“Technological fields will be unable to find enough workers in the U.S. without girls completing high-tech degree programs.”

- Land of Plenty: Diversity as America's Competitive Edge in Science, Engineering and Technology. Congressional Commission on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in Science, Engineering, and Technology Development, 2000.

About the Collaborative for Gender Equity

Mentoring and Mythbusting: Cultivating Gender Equity in Emerging Technologies
(National Science Foundation Advanced Technology Program Award # 0703149)
takes a multi-faceted approach toward encouraging high school girls to
pursue careers in cutting-edge technologies. This collaborative for gender
equity—a partnership between staff at CORD (www.cord.org)
and Moraine Valley Community College's Center for Systems Security and
Information Assurance (www.cssia.org)—is
designed to dispel myths about girls' abilities in science and technology,
provide the tools for mentoring programs to take root, disseminate information
about high-tech careers and the coursework needed to succeed in them,
and foster the development of a classroom culture conducive to gender
equity. Research shows that girls will not succeed if they do not believe
that they can succeed. Thus, woven as an inextricable part of the fabric
of this project is the need for the recognition and reversal of explicit
and implicit biases in all project stakeholders. The three project activities
designed to accomplish this are the development of: 1) Mentoring Program
Coordinator Training workshops; 2) an Online Mentoring Toolkit; and 3)
a 6-week, online professional development course, Fostering Gender Equity
in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Classroom.

Project Team:

Ann-Claire Anderson, Project PI
Sr. Research Associate, CORD

Margaret Semmer, Project Co-PI
Dean of Career and Technical Education, Joliet Junior College

This material is based upon work supported by the National
Science Foundation under ATE Grant No. 0703149.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in
this material are those of
the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science
Foundation.